The inkjet printing process is now well known. Recently, wide format printers have become commercially available, making feasible the printing of large format articles such as posters, signs, and banners. Inkjet printers are relatively inexpensive as compared with many other hardcopy output devices, such as electrostatic printers. Generally, inkjet inks are wholly or partially water-borne. Inkjet images may be printed on plain paper or on a suitable ink receptor medium that has been treated or coated to improve its ink receptor properties. For example, it is known to apply an additional layer of material to an ink receptor medium to improve the receptivity to and adhesion of inkjet inks. Such known materials are overhead transparencies and glossy papers, but they can have certain disadvantages such as color bleed, low ink capacity (i.e., flooding), a slow ink absorption rate (long dry times), and low color density.
Porous solids created by nature or by synthetic design have found great utility in the areas of catalysis and separation. Generally, such porous materials are classified by pore size: microporous having pore sizes of &lt;2 nm; macroporous having pore sizes exceeding 50 nm; and mesoporous having pore sizes between 2 and 50 nm. Such porous materials can be structurally amorphous, paracrystalline, or crystalline. Amorphous materials (for example, silica gel) and paracrystalline materials exhibit wide pore size distributions in the mesoporous range. Zeolites and molecular sieves have highly crystalline structures and uniform pore size, but have pore sizes in the microporous range. Mesoporous molecular sieves are known having a narrow pore size distribution, but they are generally said to be formed of aggregated particles and having a broad particle size distribution and a morphology ranging from spherical to hexagonal prisms.